This Week in the Voice: New York City’s Best Dive Bars

October 6, 2010

Sometimes, New Yorkers need a drink. Not a cocktail, not mixology, not a libation or a concoction, but a drink, plain and simple. Good think they live in New York City: throw a stone, and you’ll find a place to drown your sorrows on the relatively cheap and/or DL. But how to separate the divinely divey bars from the rest of the pack? That’s what we’re here for. Ben Westoff finds the finest dives in the five boroughs, and sussing out New York’s Best Dive Bars.

Elsewhere this week, in News, we’re finding gritty New Yorkers in full blossom:

How gritty and everyman is New York Gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino? So gritty, columnist Tom Robbins finds, that he feels the need to scream at the janitors who keep the headquarters of his $150M empire clean. Robbins call him out: Carl Paladino, Buffalo Bully.

Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto was in attendance at the “Gayest night since Stonewall,” naturally. Did it involve Liza Minnelli? Obviously. Hell, the title of this week’s column of his just screams “NEED-TO-KNOW-BASIS”: Jerry Lewis Won’t Bang Ladies in Chicago! And now, you know!

This week in Music, gritty happenings are just business as usual:

Do you know what a Waka Flocka Flame is? Sean Fennessey does. Hint: It’s not a variation of the clap. It’s a rapper. And he’s screaming at you. For a reason.

Guru, one half of rap duo Gang Starr, is fondly remembered by many, but in the case of veteren rap duo Group Home, the memories take on a different dimension, Phillip Mlynar reports.

If a band called “Unearthly Trance” sounds scary to you, you’re probably just being a pansy. These guys look nice! And also, they’re Black Sabbath fiends. Stewart Voegtlin reports on Unearthly Trance’s fifth album. Don’t be a pansy.

In Food this week, people are hungry and eating food:

How is it than in a town seriously lacking in Venezuelan food, two Venezuelan restaurants are now located within blocks from one another? Sarah DiGregorio reviews the East Village’s Guayoyo, and finds out.

Meanwhile, Voice food critic Robert Sietsema, where will you transport us this week? To one of New York’s “merely good” Vietnamese restaurants in Chinatown, Tu Do, where the “pho” needs to step up its game. Pho real.

In Film, we’re finding people doing old things in new ways:

Can the documentarian behind No End In Sight conjure up the same audience rage that he did previously with Wall Street as his latest focus? Legendary Voice film critic J. Hoberman can answer that for you, as he reviews Charles Ferguson’s latest, Inside Job.

Edward Norton’s latest, Stone, co-starring Robert DeNiro, isn’t the first time the actor’s played a character with a certain sense of duality to him. In fact, he as he talks with Karina Longworth, it seems to be the story of his career. This is Ed Norton’s Double Life.

Without runing too much of Nick Pinkerton’s review of Marwencol, let’s just say it sounds like the most exhilarating, original, painful, and beautiful documentaries to come around in a while. On a small scale, in a big way.

You ever hear the term “crazy cool”? Well, let’s see if It’s Kind of a Funny Story, about a depressed, teenage New Yorker can make crazy…oh, what the hell, it’s got Zach Galifiniakis in it and the kids are never not gonna think being crazy is cool. Bottom line.